Travel Trade

Every object you use carries a hidden history. A simple phone, a piece of clothing, a cup of coffee, or a basic household item is not as simple as it appears. Behind each product lies a vast and complex global system of extraction, production, transportation, and human effort. "The Secret Life of Global Goods" reveals these invisible journeys and shows how everyday items are connected to a world that stretches far beyond what we usually see.

Bloomsbury presents Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter, read by William Elsman. When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday’s newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don’t want and turn it into something...

Here eminent food historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher narrates the brewing traditions and contemporary production of beer across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America—from the fermented beverages of precapitalist societies to the present. Unique local products, often homebrewed by women, were transformed into homogenous global commodities as giant brewing factories exported their beers using new refrigeration technology, railroads, and steamships.

Peter Pond, a fur trader, explorer, and amateur mapmaker, spent his life ranging much farther than Milford, Connecticut, where he was born and died (1740-1807). He traded around the Great Lakes, on the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers, in the Canadian Northwest, and was a partner in Montreal’s North West Company. Knowing 18th-century North America on a scale that few others did, Pond drew some of the earliest maps of western Canada. David Chapin presents Pond’s life as part of a generation of traders who came of age between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.